Why the excitement

It's not just IT

I work in a major science and technology laboratory, Phds to the left Phds to the right in every discipline you can imagine and the biggest complaint regardless of technical or scientific background :- there is no technical career path, to move up through the ranks which is the only way to a decent payrise requires you to develop management skills.

That said IT and computer science, since they are different things, are not good careeer choices esp. the latter. Computing has been dumbed down by easy to use tools such as Visual Basic, Excel etc to the point that large models are being built by non-computer specialists. I was in one meeting when I asked a near board level person what they intended to do about computing support in the lab. The reply was to ask for everyone to put their hand up who had a copy of MS Office on their desk; 100% of course and Excel met their needs.

With that attitude establishing a specialist niche for a computing career is hard work to say the very least.

But at least this article has convinced me that it's not just me who's finding it hard going.